I am planning on presenting Google Earth and Nasa World Winds at an upcoming conference in out state. I was just wondering if anyone had any ideas or examples I could show. My partner and I have started working on creating our own lesson plans to integrate GE in our county's classrooms.

Thanks in advance for any ideas!

Mickey

09-02-2005, 02:19 AM

This thread (http://www.googleearthhacks.com/forums/showthread.php?t=119) should help answer some of the technical issues, such as how to save video clips.

As for the content itself, hopefully someone else can help. :)

jemalaska

03-13-2006, 03:33 PM

I just wrapped up my first unit using GE. As I am just learning the program myself, and because we using very old macs, there were a few hickups.

They had to place-mark a total of nine locations; three in Mesopotamia, three in Egypt, and three in India. They had to find evidence of irrigation, cities, and impressive physical features. This sounds simple, but it was not. For 3 days we met in the "old lab". The computers in that room worked, but required a delicate touch. The kids did not appreciate that they needed to give the old computers lots of time to start up and perform basic functions. Still they got through it and many of them managed to save to the server. On the last day we went to the "new lab" in the elementary school. These computers worked great! Speed and stability were not an issue, and the kids were quick to conclude that they only wanted to work in this lab from now on. I came to the same conclusion. We probably had 18 kids in the lab on the last day. All but two of them ended up with nine locations and a “flyover tour”. Those that did not complete the assignment seemed to think that they would not be assessed. Indeed they seemed a little surprised when I told them they would need to come back to the lab on Monday to complete their jobs.
Many of the students were not able to resist the temptation to simply “surf the globe” and place-mark locations they thought were interesting. They seemed baffled when I told them that there could be only nine locations, and they had to be Egypt, India, and Mesopotamia. One kid marked 40 places; none of them fit the requirement of the assignment.
The other challenge many of the kids had was accessing their prior knowledge. Instead of just looking at the globe and identifying the places, some kids kept trying to type in addresses. It was a real challenge to convince them that the representation on the screen was no different than the paper maps they had already worked with. Weird huh?
One part of the unit that needs to be improved is how to manage the GE files. These files need to be checked by the teacher. This is difficult to do during class, and even harder after class when the files are saved to individual student folders on the server. From my perspective the best way to save these GE files would be on flash drives that the kids leave with the teacher. It costs about six dollars for the smallest USB flash drive.

jamesblodgett

02-12-2007, 10:52 PM

We created a "drop folder" for all of our teachers on a shared network space. The students have permission to write to the folder, but they can't see inside of it or over-write existing files, so they can't use it to steal the work of someone else. You do need to get the students to use a naming convention so you can tell the files apart. :D